The most keenly awaited book of the year - the superb new novel by the author of A Spot of Bother and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea was published by Picador in 2005, and his last novel, A Spot of Bother, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2006. Mark Haddon lives in Oxford.
Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) sets his sights on the modern social novel with a seriously dysfunctional family. Radiologist Richard, newly remarried to Louisa, who has something of a "footballer's wife" about her, hosts his resentful sister Angela and her family at his vacation home in the English countryside for the week. Both Richard's new wife, and her cold-blooded 16-year-old daughter, Melissa, arouse the attentions of Angela's teenage children: son Alex, and daughter Daisy, whose sexual curiosity might lead her to trouble. Angela's uninterested husband, Dominic; their youngest son, Benjy; and the lurking ghost of their stillborn child round out the family. But most of all there's the universe of media-from books and iPods to DVDs and video games-that fortifies everyone's private world; intrudes upon a week of misadventures, grudges, and unearthed secrets; and illuminates Haddon's busy approach to fairly sedate material, a choice that unfortunately makes the payoffs seldom worth the pages of scattershot perspective. Characters are well-drawn (especially regarding the marital tensions lurking below facades of relative bliss), but what emerges is typical without being revelatory, familiar without becoming painfully human. The tiresomely quirky Haddon misses the epochal timbre that Jonathan Franzen hit with Freedom, and his constantly distracted novel is rarely more than a distraction itself. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander. (June 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Wealthy doctor Richard, having recently married trophy wife Louisa and inherited a teenage stepdaughter, the classically disaffected, aggressive Melissa, is feeling bad about his estrangement from sister Angela, particularly after Mum's death. So he invites Angela and her family-husband Dominic and three children-for a holiday at a rented house on the Welsh border. Could anything sound more grim and humdrum, not simply for the vacationers but for the reader? In fact, in the capable hands of British author Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), this is a stunning and absorbing read. The not unexpected happens-Richard and Angela scrap over who fared better in childhood; Angela's older son, Alex, struggles to shrug off teen dopiness and get it on with Melissa; misfit daughter Daisy, in a devout Christian phase, comes to a shattering new personal place; feckless Dominic's sins are revealed; and Benjy, still unplugged from adult tensions, plays Batman. VERDICT Refreshingly, Haddon takes the risk of making the ordinary extraordinary and succeeds; each character is poignantly real and each small trauma a revelation. And the language! Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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